Harvard associate director of the Fogg Art Museum;
developer of one of the early museum studies courses in the United States.
Sachs was the eldest son of Samuel Sachs and Louisa Goldman Sachs, the father a
partner of the investment firm Goldman Sachs. The younger Sachs attended the
School for Boys and Collegiate Institution before graduating from Harvard
University in 1900. As a student, Sachs collected prints and
drawings with fellow classmate Edward W. Forbes. After graduating,
Sachs went to work in the family business, becoming a partner in 1904. He
married Meta Pollak. When Forbes succeeded Charles H. Moore as the
director of the William Hayes Fogg Art Museum in 1909, Forbes looked around for
a competent person to be his assistant director. Sachs had been making
donations to the Fogg since 1911, then only a small art collection consisting
mostly of Italian primitives. In 1912 Sachs was appointed to the
museum's Visiting Committee. In 1914 he persuaded Sachs to leave his
investment business to become assistant curator, despite Sachs having no
curatorial background. Sachs spent that summer in Italy, seeing as much as
as he could before his arrival at Harvard in the autumn of 1915. Sach's
first lectures in art history occurred in 1916-1917 at Wellesley College where he
had been appointed "Lecturer in Art." He was made an assistant professor
in the department of fines arts at Harvard in 1917. Together, Forbes and
Sachs formed a team of fundraising, teaching and museum development which set a
standard for academic museum direction. The two were so closely associated
that Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell described them as "mendicant Siamese
twins." Forbes took a leave of absence from the museum briefly for war service in World War I.
Because of his height (5 feet, 2 inches), Sachs was ineligible for the army, but served as a
major with the American Red Cross. After returning, Sachs was made an associate
director of the Fogg in 1923. The year before, he had begun his celebrated
course in museum curatorship, Fine Arts 15a, "Museum Work and Museum Problems,"
known to students as "the museum course." Sachs' business experience helped in
teaching administrative skills to his students. His position as a
collector and person of wealth opened doors to private collections for many of
his students. He was appointed full professor in 1927. That same year the Fogg moved to new quarters. Sachs hired Smith graduate Agnes Mongan to
assist in cataloging the burgeoning Fogg collection. In 1929 he advised Abby Aldrich Rockefeller to hire
one of his students, Alfred H. Barr., jr., to be the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. Sachs also became one of seven founding members of the Museum and gave it its
first drawing, a George Grosz portrait of the artist's mother, 1926-1927.
Sachs' other important art connections included a friendship with Sears-Roebuck
magnate Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932), and Rosenwald's daughter, the collector
and (later MoMA trustee) Adele Levy (1892-1960).
Sachs set about developing a program of museum education, developing what he
termed the "connoisseur-scholar." One aspect included what was
commonly called "the Print Course," a seminar-style analysis of prints and
drawings drawn largely from Sach's personal collection. From 1935 onward, he served
regularly as chair of the Division of
Fine Arts as the department was then known. In 1936, Sachs participated in
the celebrated "Albertina Affair." Archduke Albrecht, in a bid to gain the
title of Emperor of Hungary, attempted a secret negotiation with the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts to sell his print and drawing collection--the greatest one
in the world and part of the cultural legacy of Austria. Sachs and Mongan
traveled secretly to Vienna with Boston curator of Prints and Drawing's Henry Rossiter, authenticating hundreds of drawings until the
Austrian government learned of the plan. The collection was
seized and nationalized, however, Sachs had nearly acquired the greatest single
collection of drawings in the world. Harvard awarded him an honorary
doctorate in 1942. In 1945 Sachs and Forbes retired together from the
museum, Sachs remaining in the department until 1948 when he was named a
professor emeritus. In 1961 his wife preceded him in death. He died
at his desk at Shady Hill while working on his memoirs. His
students--those who benefited from his museum courses or were placed by him in
positions of prestige, included William Liebermann, Evert "Chick" Austin,
Walter Pach, Edward M. "Eddie" Warburg, Frederick Deknatel,
Agnes Mongan, John Walker, James Rorimer, Perry Rathbone, Sydney Freedberg, George M.A. Hanfmann, John Coolidge, Milton Brown, Beaumont Newhall, Eleanor Sayre, Henry P. McIlhenny and the collector Joseph Pulizer, jr. (1913-1993).

Sachs' contribution to art museology was his famous "Museum Course" a seminar
conducted Mondays out of his home, Shady Hill (the former residence of Charles Eliot Norton) in Cambridge and Fridays at the Fogg. The class amounted
to a detailed connoisseur-style discussion of art. The course was
one of the earliest ones in museum studies and through it Sachs trained a great
many of the next generation of museum directors. During the era when art
museums were being founded or reestablished as serious institutions, a great
many board trustees contacted Sachs for a recently graduated student to head
their institution. Universities creating departments of art history also
found Sachs willing to outline programs to fit academic requirements. He
was an editor of the Art Bulletin from 1919-1940.

Sachs was the kind of person about whom legends quickly arose. Due to his
short stature, he hung the paintings at the Fogg to fit his own view.
As many of Sach's students eventually were responsible for installations in
major museums, they all tended to hang pictures low, assuming Sach's habit to be
the museum norm. Students called him "Uncle Paul" for his avuncular
countenance--but never to his face. Others, notably Julian Levy, characterized
him as "pompous and willful." (Marquis). One assistant, Otto Wittmann, recalled Sachs taking advange of the war to buy Degas estate drawings (Degas had died in 1917) sending them home.

Bibliography: Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1940; A Loan Exhibition of Early Italian Engravings
(intaglio) Fogg Art Museum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1915; Modern Prints & Drawings: a Guide to a Better Understanding of
Modern Draughtsmanship. New Yorkl Knopf, 1954; The Pocket Book of Great
Drawings. New York, Pocket Books, 1951.